Cost your recipes, price with confidence, invoice your clients, and be ready for tax time — without a single spreadsheet formula.
Here's what a typical workflow looks like for bakers.
Enter your ingredients with costs per unit. Add labor time for baking and decorating. Clearmargin calculates the true cost per recipe.
Create a proposal and select your recipe. Pricing pulls directly from your ingredient costs and markup — no spreadsheet math.
Log time spent on baking, decorating, and delivery. Record ingredient purchases so your actual costs stay current.
Generate an invoice from the proposal or tracked costs. Show line items or a clean total — match what your client expects.
After delivery and payment, see your real margin. Compare estimated vs actual costs across all your orders.
Proposals, contracts, time tracking, invoicing, expenses, and tax prep — all in one place.
Build recipes with ingredients, quantities, and costs. Sub-recipes for components like buttercream or ganache.
Organize ingredients into categories (flour, dairy, decorations) with automatic markup percentages.
Save your most popular offerings as templates. Birthday cakes, wedding tiers, cookie boxes — quote in seconds.
Set milestones tied to event dates: tasting, order confirmation, bake day, delivery. Never miss a deadline.
Record ingredient purchases, packaging costs, and delivery supplies. Categorized for tax time.
Generate invoices from proposals or manually. Include deposit schedules for large orders.
Log delivery drives with IRS standard rate. See the true cost of offering delivery to your clients.
Expenses auto-categorize to Schedule C lines. Ingredients, packaging, and delivery are all deductible.
Collect deposits upfront and final payment on delivery. Automated reminders keep cash flow steady.
Explore a demo account pre-loaded with realistic bakersdata — proposals, invoices, expenses, and profitability reports.
Explore the demoHome bakers and cottage food businesses need to track income and expenses for taxes, but traditional accounting software is designed for accountants, not bakers. What you actually need is recipe costing, simple invoicing, and tax-ready expense tracking. Clearmargin gives you all three without a single journal entry.
The most reliable way to price custom cakes is to start with your actual ingredient and labor costs, then add your markup. Build a recipe with per-unit ingredient costs and estimated labor time, and let the math tell you your floor price. Clearmargin calculates recipe costs automatically and applies markup by ingredient category.
Bakers need invoicing that connects to their pricing. If you calculate recipe costs in a spreadsheet and then manually type an invoice in a separate tool, you are doubling your work. Clearmargin pulls pricing directly from your recipes into proposals and invoices, and supports deposit schedules for large orders.
Enter each ingredient with its cost per unit (per pound, per ounce, per egg). Build recipes by selecting ingredients and quantities. Use sub-recipes for components you make in batches, like buttercream or fondant. Clearmargin handles all of this and keeps your costs current as ingredient prices change.